Language has history, therefore color, cultural bias, and karma. Take tree. In Old English, every sense of the word tree signaled objects made of dead trees: timber, plank, log, stake.
Living trees were distinguished by the word beam.
But then Bede translated the biblical “columna lucis” as “beam of light” instead of “pillar of fire.” After that, beam became largely biblical and optical.
People stopped calling living trees beams.
And so, they called them trees.
Tree (object): timber, plank, log, stake
Bede’s poetic choice, “living tree of light,” beautiful as it is, inadvertently led to the de-animation of tree for English-speaking people of European descent in the USA, such that
white so-called developers, city planners, and councils casually refer to a woods of more than 400 trees of grand size as “a remnant lot” and
“infill development” that
“must” “has to” “be removed,”
that is, killed (clear cut and shredded), without a thought to the life they vanquish.
Their greed is transitive; it has a direct object, which is the subject, which is living trees,
which includes all the beings living within and among them,
and the yield of trees: urgently needed carbon drawdown and sink, earth-girding roots, their green and dusk, their exultation in needles and leaves.
Entire realities we cannot know.
In the hour when the city council nominally received public opinion, then voted as everyone knew they would,
a Chartres-blue hour,
the trees lit themselves Byzantine-gold.
—
Books by Su Love include Weight of Light, nominated for the Pushcart Editors’ Book Prize, and Buddha, Proof, a Minnesota Book Award finalist. Su’s sixth book concerns legacies of nuclear power in Minnesota and is supported by the Minnesota State Arts Board, Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, and St. Croix Watershed Research Station. Su has been a visiting writer at several colleges, universities and organizations including Salmon Literary Centre, Ireland, and American Space Madrid/Instituto Internacional. sulove.org.
